3. What assessment has the Government made of the effectiveness of Rent Smart Wales in increasing standards within the rental sector? OQ58918

Diolch, Peter. Rent Smart Wales has a key role in the sector, taking enforcement action on non-compliant landlords and providing training to ensure landlords are fully aware of their legal obligations. We are going to commission an evaluation of the delivery and impact of Rent Smart Wales later this year.  

Thank you, Minister, for your response. I recognise that Rent Smart Wales has an important role to play in ensuring high standards within the private rental sector in Wales, providing landlords and tenants with that important advice and support they need. However, since being elected to the Senedd, I have received numerous pieces of correspondence from local landlords and agents who have had issues with Rent Smart Wales. For example, they've spoken about the poor customer service, including the inability to speak to staff on the phone due to understaffing. Concerns have also been raised with me about the Rent Smart Wales website often being slow and inaccessible for some. Long waiting times for requests for information and help are really holding things up and stopping them complying with their statutory obligations. Due to these delays, some landlords have noted that they have experienced issues in things like registering and renewing their membership, which has caused even further issues. Minister, what assurances can you provide landlords, agents and tenants that the Government's external review—as you mentioned—of Rent Smart Wales will fully take their experiences into consideration and will learn from this? And what steps is the Government taking to help RSW to address staffing and capacity issues? 

Thank you, Peter. I'll just run through where we've been, because we absolutely acknowledge that we've had difficulty with keeping the staffing at the level we'd like it to have been all the way through, as a result of the pandemic and a number of other economic issues. Back in August 2022, Rent Smart Wales did take the decision to close the telephone lines to incoming calls, due to a severe shortage of staff during that period. That allowed them to concentrate their efforts on meeting their statutory targets for licensing landlords and agents. They deliberately made that decision to concentrate their existing staff on a body of work that they were undertaking. But all other contact from landlords was answered, and an accessibility line was introduced for those landlords who had no other means of contact, once that was drawn to our attention.

We've had significant staff recruitment and training in the meantime. The telephone line was reopened on 24 October between the hours of 09:00 and 11:00. I just want to assure everyone who's listening that if you phone before 11:00 and you're in the queue, you will be answered. So, if you want to speak to them make sure you're on that line before 11:00, and then all the calls will be answered afterwards. I'm very pleased about that. We also want to make aware that people are able to request a callback via the contact form on the website. If you don't want to sit on telephone line waiting, you can ask for a callback, and that will also be answered. So, I want to assure people that they will be responded to. We've had 12 new employees that have started with Rent Smart Wales this week, in fact, after a recruitment exercise. They're planning to extend the opening times of the contact centre further later this month, once those employees are trained and up to speed. We have seen a real improvement in the performance of Rent Smart Wales over the last few months, with response times to e-mails now down to around a week, which I'm really pleased to say.

Nearly 60,000 landlords and 10,000 agents have completed the core training, and we've had over 27,000 landlords complete the continuous professional development modules. We've written out to all registered landlords to remind them of the requirements to complete the free Renting Homes (Wales) Act 2016 training by the end of February. So, Peter, I think I'm saying I acknowledge the difficulties. We're sorry for them. There was a real, serious recruitment problem. A lot of measures have been put in place to address that. We've made sure that landlords are aware of that and that the backlog is being cleared. So, we really hope now that the service will find itself on an equilibrium and be able to roll out the training in a much more satisfactory way. And then, when we do the review—. That's why the review is later in the year; we want to get these new arrangements to bed in, and then we want to test their suitability, and of course we'll be asking landlords for their opinion once the new arrangements have bedded in.